292 ChaPter^6
II–with the use of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. American
President Harry S. Truman approved the use of the bombs, against the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 150,000 people, almost
all civilians, on August 6th and 9th, 1945 because, he said, otherwise U.S.
troops would have to invade Japan and suffer huge losses. After some initial
skepticism and debate over the bomb, by the later 1940s, overwhelming per-
centages of the American people supported Truman’s decision. In part this was
because few people saw the physical effects of the bomb–the U.S. government
confiscated hundreds of hours of video footage taken at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945 so the public would not view it [much like President
Barack Obama refused to release photos of torture from Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq in 2009]. A generation later, however, in the 1960s, scholars and others
began to question the use of the bomb, and the very origins of the Cold War
and the use of American power. The U.S., fearing that German scientists
would invent an atomic bomb, had begun the Manhattan Project to research and
develop and atomic weapon at the beginning of the war in order to use it
against Germany or Japan if needed.FIGuRE 6-1 Bombing of Nagasaki, Japan